Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today

Edited by Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul

Description

The city of Pompeii has had an enormous impact on Western imaginations since its rediscovery under the ashes of the volcano that destroyed it in 79 CE. In the 250 years since excavations began, Pompeii has helped to bring the ancient world to life for everyone, from music hall audiences to gentleman scholars, and it continues to have an impact on the way in which we think about the past, and the human condition itself. The contributors to this generously illustrated volume, who include the novelist Robert Harris, in a recorded interview, investigate how Pompeii has been used in film, fiction, and art on both sides of the Atlantic over three centuries. They explore the many different ways in which Pompeii inhabits our imaginations: as ghostly relic of human suffering, romantic ruin, model of cultural inspiration, home of a distant, decadent culture, and comforting model for everyday life.

Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today

Edited by Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Ruins and Reconstructions, Shelley Hales & Joanna Paul2. A Tamed 'desire for images': Goethe's Repeated Approaches to Pompeii, Thorsten Fitzon3. Ruined Waking Thoughts: William Beckford as a Visitor to Pompeii, Constanze Baum4. Making History: Pliny's Letters to Tacitus and Angelica Kauffman's `Pliny and his Mother at Misenum', Victoria C. Gardner Coates5. Site, Sight, and Symbol: Pompeii and Vesuvius in `Corinne, or Italy', Barbara Witucki6. Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii: Recreating the City, Stephen Harrison7. Objects of Affection: Necromantic Pathos in Bulwer-Lytton's City of the Dead, Meilee D. Bridges8. Delusion and Dream in Theophile Gautier's `Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompei', GenevieveLiveley9. Archaeology Meets Fantasy: Chasseriau's Pompeii in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Sarah Betzer10. Italian Classical Revival Painters and the 'Southern Question', Luna Figurelli11. Cities of the Dead, Shelley Hales12. Christians and Jews at Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Eric Moormann13. Rocks, Ghosts and Footprints: Freudian Archaeology, Daniel Orrells14. On the Edge of the Volcano: `The Last Days of Pompeii' in the Early American Republic, Margaret Malamud15. Experiencing The Last Days of Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, Jon L. Seydl16. In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii, Francesca Spiegel17. Excavation Photographs and the Imagining of Pompeii's Streets: Vittorio Spinazzola and the Via dell'Abbondanza, Jeremy Hartnett18. The Getty Villa: Art, Architecture, and Aristocratic Self-Fashioning in the Mid-Twentieth Century, Kenneth Lapatin19. Pompeii in Roberto Rossellini's `Journey to Italy', Matthew Fox20. The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum, Kate Fisher & Rebecca Langlands21. Modern Tourists, Ancient Sexualities: Looking at Looking in Pompeii's Brothel and the Secret Cabinet, Sarah Levin-Richardson22. Writing Pompeii: An Interview with Robert Harris23. Pompeii, the Holocaust, and World War Two, Joanna Paul24. Pompeii and the Cambridge Latin Course25. Ruins and Forgetfulness: The Case of Herculaneum, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill